China building artificial islands and airstrips in South China Sea

YANGJIANG, CHINA - DECEMBER 22: (CHINA OUT) Two maritime affairs officials show the Chinese national flag as the wreck of the 800-year-old sunken merchant ship "Nanhai No.1" (or "South China Sea No. 1") is raised by a specially designed steel basket from the bottom of the sea in the background, on December 22, 2007 in South China Coast near Yangjiang of Guangdong Province, China. The 30 metres (about 100 feet) wooden vessel, discovered in 1987, containing thousands of gold, silver and porcelain trading goods. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

China has claimed that it built artificial islands on reefs in the Spratly Islands — which are also claimed by Vietnam and the Philippines — to improve weather forecasting.

The official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, People’s Daily, published two interviews with two scientists — Ding Yihui from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and director of China Meteorological Administration Zheng Guogang — to back up this claim.

The argument comes a day before US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue on Tuesday in Washington.

The meeting is expected to address the issue of Chinese structures on the islands.

Both scientists defended the new facilities as aimed at enhancing weather forecasts, in a region with extreme climatic conditions.

According to Zheng, better weather forecast is a responsibility that China owes the region, to help neighbouring countries avoid ravages of typhoons and dangerous natural phenomena, and increase security for dense fishing and maritime traffic in the area.

Those same neighbouring countries, however, had expressed alarm last year seeing Chinese activity on regional islands and reefs, a concern backed by Washington.

Beijing has repeatedly stonewalled Washington’s request to stop building on these islands.

Meanwhile, South China Morning Post on Monday quoted analysts as saying that China could use such facilities to deploy its J-11 fighter-bombers in the area, a model developed between 1990 and 2009 from the Soviet Su-27.

The J-11 has a flight range of 1,500 km, expandable with the installation of additional fuel tanks under its wings.

With such devices in the area, China could extend the presence of its air force by an additional 1,000 km to the south.

In fact, in one of the islands, a three-km track is being readied (which can be used not only by a J-11 but also by transport aircraft), and together with its aircraft carrier, ‘Liaoning’, it would allow Beijing to expand its air influence to defensive operations in mid-ocean for the first time.

Twitter has warned of “unusual activity” from state-sponsored actors based in China and Saudi Arabia after it found a bug that could have revealed the country code of users’ phone numbers or if their account was locked.

The revelation led to Twitter stock dropping nearly 7 per cent on Monday.

In a statement, Twitter said it discovered the bug on November 15 and fixed it a day later.

“During our investigation, we noticed some unusual activity involving the affected customer support form API. Specifically, we observed a large number of inquiries coming from individual IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia,” said the micro-blogging platform, used by over 336 million users, on one of its support forms.

“While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors,” Twitter warned.

Twitter on a smartphone device. Pixabay

The bug, said the company, could be used to discover the country code of people’s phone numbers if they had one associated with their Twitter account, as well as whether or not their account had been locked by Twitter.

Twitter locks an account if it appears to be compromised or in violation of its rules or Terms of Service.

“Importantly, this issue did not expose full phone numbers or any other personal data.

“We have directly informed the people we identified as being affected. We are providing this broader notice as it is possible that other account holders we cannot identify were potentially impacted,” Twitter said, adding it is “sorry this happened”.

A Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch: “For our part, we are committed to understanding how bad-faith actors use our services. We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter.” (IANS)